No image has ever created a massive war, ideology, or crime. Unless you count people who kill painters and artists because they are afraid of their power, of course. The simple truth is that words and language are the best, if not the only, means to communicate worldviews. Images, as propaganda, are useful to reinforce a previously held belief, make a joke, resume more complex ideas, or may be used as “infographics” to make a point. However, those images would not be useful if the observer had no previous idea or reference about what they are talking about. For example, an antisemitic cartoon that stereotypes Jews as blood-sucking vampires is only useful if the person who sees this has already heard about those accusations from other places (his parents, friends, the education system, journalists, etc.). To an alien from another planet, the cartoon would be incomprehensible or ridiculous.

TL,DR version: Lol games aren’t real, killing isn’t even the goal, it’s competing to win at something. Gore is just edgy window-dressing.

Although there are some issues that truly divide a nation, most public debates that go on forever have the same problem: They are not well defined, the meaning of words shift according to the current needs of the speaker, and there are invisible premises inside the problem/question. It is like that trap: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” There is no way to answer that. Modern politics and social debates follow similar patterns, although not in such a crass or evident fashion. Among other reasons, this is why debates seem circular and eternal since the conclusion is already inserted in how the problem is defined.

The gaming mindset is completely different from the reading or watching a movie mindset. Your brain is behaving differently, and also expecting a different kind of stimulation. To analyze the content and effects of one medium by the rules and parameters of the other is a big mistake. And to analyze any of those mediums as if it were reality, your mental and ideological reality to boot, is criminal.